Flirting With French (6 page)

As for my own “event,” my heart returns to a normal rhythm on the fourth day—I know before the nurses do—and the following morning I go home. The first thing I do is take a long, hot shower, washing my greasy hair three times, scrubbing the smell of hospital off my skin, out of my nostrils. Then I make tea and stare out the window for a long time, watching a soft drizzle, taking comfort in something I used to take for granted: as the French say,
lubb-dupp,
lubb-dupp, lubb-dupp.

Lubb-dupp
.

It’s Complicated

You can really feel you’re having breakfast in Paris without even making the trip.

—
JULIA CHILD
on making croissants

Warning: Do not attempt the activities described in this chapter if you have any of the following: joint or neck pain, bursitis, arthritis, a weak back, a weak stomach, a rough week, bad knees, bunions, an expanding waistline, or anything else to do for the rest of the day. Or tomorrow.

Our daughter, Katie, who has two semesters of college French under her belt (at least she learned from my mistake), is coming home for her winter break in a few days and is, I fear, expecting some serious Frenchiness out of her old man when she arrives. I’d better start cramming for my oral. After breakfast I spend some time with Fluenz French, which, because it doesn’t have a speech recognition engine like Rosetta Stone’s, requires you to type in all your responses, thereby putting the focus on written rather than spoken French. I find this laborious and exhausting, not to mention misdirected; I don’t expect to be doing a lot of writing in France.

Worse, the on-screen instructor who introduces each lesson in a seven-minute video has a stray lock of hair over one eye that’s driving both of us nuts. I’m helpless to do anything about it, but she keeps flipping it back with a little head toss, and I become more occupied with making bets as to when she’s next going to toss her head than with listening to what she’s saying. It’s looking as if Georgetown professor Heidi Byrnes was correct when she warned me about the paucity of self-instruction materials. Or perhaps the problem is just my attention span. Either way, there’s not much French going down, so after an hour
I
go down, to the kitchen, in search of a midmorning snack.

“There’s nothing to eat,” I say to Anne, sounding, I imagine, like a whining
enfant
.

“What did you want?”

“If we were in France, we’d be munching on croissants right now.”

“You want to go to France?”

“I want a croissant.”

“Make some.”

This from a woman who is intimidated making an omelette (we’ll use the French spelling in this book!). Having planted the seed of a dangerous idea in my head, Anne, as is her fashion, vanishes, her words hanging in the air like the smells wafting from a Parisian
boulangerie.
Make croissants? Interesting concept. Maybe the over-the-top Gallic nature of the activity will stimulate my inspirational French nerve receptors. And even if it doesn’t, I’ll still have croissants for Katie when she arrives, which with any luck will paper over how bad my French is after what is now six months of daily study.

Having grown up in the 1950s and 1960s, I don’t I think I even saw, much less ate, a croissant before going to France. The closest I came was on those special nights when my mom would sharply rap a cardboard cylinder of Pillsbury crescent rolls against the edge of the countertop, unroll and separate the triangular pieces of dough, and wrap them around hot dogs, transforming (or desecrating, depending on your point of view) the most iconic of French foods, the very symbol of the Continental breakfast, into a form of American pop food art that Andy Warhol surely would have approved of. Although I must say that the baked crescent dogs are not half-bad. A little greasy maybe. They’re not croissants, or even close to croissants, with or without the hot dog, but they’re not bad, and for years my kids wouldn’t dream of our having a party without serving bite-size crescent dogs as hors d’oeuvres (a French term meaning “outside the work,” originally an architectural term referring to an outbuilding until it was appropriated by chefs for its current use).

The true croissant, although nearly synonymous with France, was actually invented in Austria, where it was called a
Kipferl
—yet another reason to be learning French. Would you rather speak the language that says
Kipferl
or the one that says
croissant,
even if the correct pronunciation of the initial
cr
requires the placement of one’s own tongue into a region of the throat that you thought only Linda Lovelace knew about. Legends of the
Kipferl
’s origin abound. The most popular one is that it was created in 1683 by Viennese bakers who, up all night baking, heard the invading Ottomans tunneling under the city and gave the alarm. After the victory, they created a roll shaped into a crescent, invoking the Ottoman flag. A colorful tale, but it’s probably as true as the story that the baguette was inspired by Napoleon, who insisted his bakers create a loaf that could be strapped to his soldiers’ legs.

What is true is that an Austrian baker, August Zang, introduced the
Kipferl
to France when he opened a Viennese bakery in Paris around 1839. An instant sensation, its unique flakiness and butteriness the result of four dozen alternating layers of butter and dough, the roll became known as a
croissant,
the French word for “crescent,” which, by the way, explains the appetizing lunar event that happens every month between a new moon and a quarter moon,
un croissant de lune
. (Does “crescent moon” sound as crazily romantic to a Frenchman as
croissant de lune
sounds to an American? Somehow I doubt it, which is yet another reason to . . . you know.)

Although I’ve never made croissants or any other kind of
viennoiserie
(a yeast dough enriched with eggs, sugar, and milk), I’m an experienced amateur bread baker, so I figure, how hard can it be? I have all the ingredients—flour, butter, milk, egg, and yeast—in the house. And it certainly promises to be a more enjoyable way to spend a morning than figuring out when to use
depuis
and
il y a
to mean “for” and “since,” as in “I’ve been making croissants for seven hours now” and “It seems like forever since I started making these croissants.” And that is precisely what I’ll be saying in seven hours, in addition to some choice French swear words. But for now, I tune my Internet radio to a station broadcasting out of Aix-en-Provence, get my Julia Child down from the bookshelf, and go to work to the sounds of French
chansons
. The recipe, in case you want to try this at home:

JULIA CHILD’S CROISSANTS

(Adapted by William Alexander for the Twenty-First-Century Home)

1.
La première heure:
Mix flour, salt, yeast, milk, and water into a very tight (that’s bakerspeak for dry) dough and work it until your fingers start to cramp up. Place in fridge to chill for two hours.

2.
La troisième heure:
Observe belatedly that Julia notes, “The minimum time required for making croissants is 11 to 12 hours.” Figure out how to cut a few corners while working up a sweat trying to roll out the dough, which has the consistency of Play-Doh and keeps springing back to its original shape. Take out your frustration on the butter: Julia instructs you to whack the cold butter repeatedly with a rolling pin, beating it into submission until it’s a rectangle that fits into the center of the dough (I never knew you could soften butter so quickly that way—good to remember). Note Julia’s warning to work quickly and keep dough and butter chilled at all times or risk greasy mess. When doorbell rings, frantically wash hands and run to find two Jehovah’s Witnesses who have all morning to discuss the matter of your saving. Explain it’s your croissants that need saving, take the literature, run back to kitchen, fold warming dough into thirds, and chill for thirty minutes. Roll out dough again, fold, and chill. Observe that rolling this dough is like trying to skin an antelope. A live one. Take two ibuprofen to ease pain in shoulder.

3.
La quatrième heure:
While dough is chilling, watch video of Julia Child making croissants. Her dough isn’t nearly as tight as mine, although by the end of kneading, she, too, is audibly out of breath. Note that she is assisted in her task by a rolling pin the size of a small birch tree. Picking up one of her smaller pins (that is, one about the size of mine), she mutters, “I don’t know why I ever bought this thing!” and tosses it into the garbage. I’ve always loved Julia Child, but at this moment I love her for a new reason that’s just occurred to me: Julia went to France and . . . became French! I can do this, I tell myself. If she could, I can. Julia is now panting heavily. She would never get on TV today, which tells you about the sad state of TV today.

4.
La sixième heure:
While dough is chilling, watch video of Steve Martin and Meryl Streep making croissants on the spur of the moment in the middle of the night at the bakery owned by Streep’s character. Oh, please! The movie is called
It’s Complicated,
which certainly does not refer to their making of croissants. They are having a barrel of laughs, but Streep has a sheeter, which does all the rolling, and a good film editor, who cuts out all the chilling. And when it comes to croissants, there isn’t much else. Meanwhile, back in my kitchen I’m wrestling with the dough and not laughing at all. After four folds, or “turns,” my dough, according to Julia, now has fifty-five layers! Which explains the ache in my lower back. Take two more ibuprofen.

5.
La septième heure:
Into the seventh hour, you may be reminded of the Ingmar Bergman movie
Th
e Seventh Seal,
which is not, I warn you, a tale of a half-dozen semiaquatic marine mammals, but is about a knight who loses a chess match with Death. Lesser known is the sequel, in which Death develops a strange affinity for
viennoiserie.
Finally, after seven hours, having shaved four hours off Julia’s most optimistic estimate through judicious use of the freezer, we are ready to bake. As Julia would say,
Bon appéti
t
!

TH
E CROISSANTS ARE DELICIOUS,
and ready just as Anne comes home. “You made croissants?” she says, sounding surprisingly incredulous. “I was only joking.”

You don’t say.

“Was it a lot of work?”

“About as easy as learning French.”

She takes a bite. “Oh, God, these are good! Let’s do this every Sunday!”

A Rooster in the Henhouse

Because it is a female and lays eggs, a chicken is masculine.

—
DAVID SEDARIS

Katie and I stand back and admire our work. “What do you suppose Mom’s going to think?” Katie asks as we put away the black markers and Post-it notes.

“I don’t know, but I can’t wait to see her reaction.”

“Hey, we forgot one. Do you know the word for this?” Katie asks, pointing to the toaster.

“No idea.”

Katie has taken two years of college French but hasn’t yet had to make toast, so she looks the word up in the dictionary. “
Grille-pain
. I love it! A bread grill! Can I have a sticky?”

“Masculine or feminine?”

“Masculine.”

Katie writes
le grille-pain
on a blue Post-it note and sticks it on the toaster. “
Fini!
” We have labeled everything in sight, from the dishwasher (
le lave-vaisselle
), the sink (
l’évier
), and the garbage (
la poubelle
) to the plastic lobster (
le homard
) on the wall, not to mention the wall (
le
mur
), papering the room in a dazzling mosaic of Post-it notes. It’s taken some time, because we’ve had to look up the gender of nearly all these objects. There is no logic to the assignment of gender in French. Partly because Rosetta Stone gives no guidance in this whatsoever, I have been laboring for the longest time under the common misconception that there was a rhyme and reason to gender assignment, that the object itself held the key to its gender, that girly things were feminine and manly things masculine.

Knowing the right gender is important, for gender affects the article that precedes the noun. Who would’ve thought that of all the words to translate into French, the two that would give me the most difficulty would be “a” and “the.” It’s hard for us English speakers to even wrap our heads around the facts that (1) inanimate objects have a sex, and (2) the sex changes both the article (
le/la, un/une, mon/ma
) that precedes the object and any adjectives that describe it (
un petit problè
me/une petite robe
)
.

Gender even infiltrates a common phrase like “this one,” which is
celui-ci
if the thing you’re referring to is masculine—say, a woman’s breast. If it’s a beard, which is obviously feminine (catching on?), it’s
celle-ci
. Of course, breasts usually come in pairs, so you’d better know that “those” plural masculine breasts are
ceux-là,
while plural feminine beards are
celles-là
. This French version of “dem and dose” has at least eight variations to be memorized.

Faced with masculine breasts and feminine beards, masculine arms and feminine legs, a cup of hot water that, once you drop a teabag into
her
transgenders into
him,
English speakers look for some kind of logic in gender assignment. This is a mistake. Witness the online language site that posed the pseudo-Freudian rule that objects that are concave (say, a bowl,
bol
) are feminine, while those that are convex, pointed, or aggressive (a fork,
fourchette
) are masculine. This despite the fact that “vagina” is masculine and “necktie,” that most phallic piece of men’s apparel, is feminine. Well, Katie has just set me straight in the kitchen, where, by the way, we have
le bol
and
la fourchette
.

“It has nothing to do with the nature of the object, Dad. But sometimes you can tell from the ending of the word.” A quick check of one of her old textbooks confirms that nouns ending in -
eau
and -
age
are nearly always masculine, while those that end in -
ion
are almost always feminine. There are a few other generalizations as well, but for the vast bulk of the language, you just have to memorize it. On rare occasions you can make an educated guess. Hens are females, roosters male, although chickens are, somewhat counterintuitively, male. For some animals you may have to peek underneath; a male turkey is a
dindon
while a female is a
dinde
. By the time it winds up on white bread with mayo, your guess is as good as mine.

Historian David McCullough relates the story of a mob from the Paris Commune (yet another in a series of French uprisings, this one in 1871) descending on the estate of an American, Charles Moulton, intending to take possession of every animal on the property and quite possibly to slaughter Moulton and his family. Moulton, a slight man with glasses and an atrocious accent, stepped out to face the crowd. As McCullough writes, “No sooner did Moulton open his mouth to reply than the crowd began to giggle, his pronunciation working its spell. When, raising his voice to an unusually high pitch, he declared they could have the horse, ‘
le cheval,
’ but not ‘
le vache,
’ using the masculine pronoun
le
for cow, it was more than they could bear.”

Convulsed in laughter, the mob departed with the family horse, but left
le cow,
and more importantly, the family survived.

French is far from alone in having genders. So do Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Hebrew, Russian, German, French, Italian, Punjabi, and Urdu. It’s English that’s the oddball, being the only one of the entire Indo-European family of languages in Europe without gender assignments. (Although, strictly speaking, English does have what is called a biological gender that shows up in words like “actor” and “actress,” that is, those words whose genders have worked themselves directly into the nouns.) But all genders are not created equal. In some languages, such as Italian, where nouns that end in
o
are masculine and those that end in
a
are feminine, the genders are a little easier to figure out. After all, that rule covers about half the Italian language right there.

Once you move away from the Indo-European languages, especially to isolated societies, you have a better chance of detecting some method to the gender madness. The misleading Internet post about concave objects being feminine would be fairly accurate if discussing not French but the Manambu language, spoken in Papua New Guinea, where small and rounded things are feminine, and big and long ones are masculine. Or the Australian aboriginal language of Tiwi, where a blade of grass is masculine, but a patch of grass is feminine. I swear, a Freudian could have a field (
feminine
) day delving into this stuff.

And genders are not restricted to, well, gender. A number of languages add a vegetable gender—his, hers, and eggplant—used to refer to plants and to things derived from plants, like wood. Given that gender is determined by the nature of the object in these long-unchanged languages, it is likely that the Indo-European family of languages also had a more transparent gender system at one point, but that it got corrupted, possibly when it lost the third gender that all the descendants of Latin, including French, Italian, and Spanish, had at one time: the neuter. This was a handy gender that was used for inanimate objects without a clear phallic or feminine association, and as it fell into disuse, tables and chairs had to take on either masculine or feminine genders, which is when things got messy.

The neuter survives in German today, resulting in, as linguist John McWhorter puts it, “such user-hostile cases as each piece of silverware in German having a different gender: spoons are boys, forks are girls, knives are hermaphrodites.” And girls are neuter. Go figure:
Fräulein
(unmarried woman),
Mädchen
(girl), and
Weib
(wife or woman) are all neuter. This caught Mark Twain’s attention.

In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print—I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

GRETCHEN:
Where is the turnip?

WILHELM:
She has gone to the kitchen.

GRETCHEN:
Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?

WILHELM:
It has gone to the opera.

Since English is originally derived from German, it must have had genders at one time, so we have a mystery on our hands. How, and why, did genders disappear from English?

Old English had all three German genders, and it wasn’t until the eleventh century, during the early Middle English period, that their use began to decline, as the neuter gender—our modern “the”
—
began to be used for all nouns. Did the 1066 invasion of England by a foreign force with their la-di-da
l
e
s and
la
s and
un
s and
un
e
s hasten the decline? The evidence is sketchy on this, but it has been speculated that when French became the language of the educated class in England, English became stamped as the language of the
un
educated class, and the educators—those who make or enforce the rules of languages—lost interest in it, leaving the peasants free to do as they wished.

What they wished was to make language simpler. So, while the English-cum-French speakers of the court were trying to figure out why the French word
personne
was always feminine, regardless of the sex of the person you were referring to, the peasants just took the French word, absorbed it into English as a neutered noun, and went out to milk the neutered cow. Life was too short and too hard for a peasant to worry about how to address the bloody cow.

Gender, of course, is still going strong in France. And that raises an interesting question: Because a Frenchman must refer to a fork as “her” and “she,” and must think,
C’est ma fourchette,
when musing about his fork, does he think of it, subconsciously or otherwise, as a feminine object with womanly properties? When he thinks of his beloved cheese,
son
fromage,
is there anything homoerotic going on, or is his use of the pronoun just habit—a second-nature kind of thing that means nothing, a verbal one-night stand? Fortunately, linguists have attempted to answer this question, and the answer may surprise you.

Maria Sera, a psychologist at the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota, devised an experiment to find out if French and Spanish speakers thought of feminine-gendered objects as actually having feminine traits (and the same for masculine objects). French and Spanish have different gender assignments for some common objects (forks, bananas, cars, beds, clouds, screws, and butterflies, to name a few), so Sera recruited native French and Spanish speakers who were told they were assisting in the preparation of a movie in which inanimate objects come to life. The volunteers were shown a series of pictures, without labels, and asked to choose between a man’s and a woman’s voice for each object. When French adult speakers saw their feminine fork,
la fourchette,
the vast majority of them (twenty- six out of thirty-two) wanted a female voice; when Spanish speakers saw their masculine fork,
el tenedor,
the majority of them (nineteen out of thirty-two) wanted a masculine voice.

Consider the screw. It would have to be a penis to appear any more masculine, and in Spanish it is in fact a masculine noun. When shown a picture of a screw, only two of thirty-two Spanish speakers gave it a female voice. The French, however, have assigned the screw a feminine gender, and after viewing the same picture, eleven—nearly a third—of the French speakers gave it a feminine voice. The experiment, unfortunately, did not include any biological objects with clearly counterintuitive genders (beards, chickens, or vaginas), but it did include a peanut, the word for which is feminine in French, and to which the majority of French speakers assigned a masculine voice. I’m no scientist, but I’ll humbly suggest that the results were skewed by what researchers call interference—in the guise of that international celebrity Mr. Peanut.

In another study involving German and Spanish, native speakers were asked to ascribe characteristics—strong or weak, big or little—to objects that diverged in those two languages. Here again, the gender of the objects influenced the answers. Bridges and clocks, which are masculine in Spanish, were judged to be stronger by Spaniards than by Germans, who in turn favored their masculine chairs and keys.

It has been suggested that English has lost something by dropping gender, that languages are a little richer, a bit more romantic, when they wax poetically on
la lune
or
la mer
,
that giving sexual properties to objects enriches the language and the spirit. Perhaps it does. I’ll ponder that the next time I have a fork in my mouth.

ONE BENEFIT OF THIS
gender game is that it’s provided some color for our repapered kitchen wall, since I’ve used blue Post-it notes for the masculine objects and pink for the feminine, a touch I’m particularly proud of. Katie and I stand back to admire our work. “
Pas mal,
” I say. Not bad at all, she responds in French, and I respond back. Actually, there is a term for this: conversation. Katie’s French is far better than mine, but I’m able to sustain a primitive conversation with her, albeit one strewn with so many errors in both directions that we may be speaking something closer to a patois than to real French. Nevertheless the satisfaction of this brief conversation gives me an idea. I suggest—in French, of course—that we continue speaking to each other in French.

“
Toute la journée?
” she asks. All day?

“
Non, non, ma petite. Tous les jours.
” Every day.

She looks as alarmed as if I’d just told her she has to make crêpes Suzette for the French ambassador in thirty minutes. But Katie loves a challenge, and we shake on the deal, although with one caveat. She is a little concerned about my study habits and, it must be said, not unhappy to be able to turn the tables after twelve years of enduring my nagging her about homework. As I’d feared, she is aghast that after half a year of intensive study, I haven’t learned to conjugate even regular verbs. That’s basic to learning the language, she insists, no matter what Rosetta Stone says.